I Walked With a Zombie just might be my favorite Lewton film. It's the atmosphere that makes Lewton's movies, and this one has lots of it. It's suspenseful and eerily unsettling. The music and pacing as well as the development of the story all contribute to making the film at once lulling and anxious, a sort of tension and inertia both at the same time.
The story centers around Betsy (Frances Dee), a nurse from cold Canada, hired to care for the sick wife of Paul Holland, a sugar farmer on the island of Saint Sebastien. In fact, a grotesque wooden figurehead of Saint Sebastien, once on the front of the slave ship which brought "the long-ago fathers and the long-ago mothers," stands in the courtyard of the Holland home.
Betsy first meets Paul Holland (Tom Conway) aboard the ship bringing her to Saint Sebastien. He senses her appreciation of the physical beauty around her, and deliberately shoots it down, saying "everything good dies here," as they watch a falling star.
At the beginning, the character Paul Holland is a lot like Dr. Judd (played by the same actor) in Cat People and The Seventh Victim, so it takes a while to warm up to him. In fact, one wonders if his bitterness doesn't render him unlikeable, and if perhaps he is to blame for his wife's condition. He is proud, and he is bitter about women who think themselves beautiful and charming. And he doesn't take advice well, whether it comes from one of the plantation's overseers, or from Betsy, though his growing admiration and respect for her is shown in his following her advice even after he said he wouldn't. (At the request of his mother, she asked him leave the whiskey decanter off the table when Wesley was eating with them).
Paul Holland is much like Jane Eyre's Rochester, right down to his mad first wife. But this movie owes at least as much to Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca as to Bronte's Jane Eyre.
Paul comes to love Betsy for her compassion, bravery, and her "clean, decent thinking." But he also fears that he makes things ugly, and that he will destroy the calm, good love between them.
Betsy next meets Paul's younger half-brother, Wesley Rand (James Ellison), who has a drinking problem, and who, it comes out, was in love with Paul's beautiful wife, leading to all kinds of fraternal tension.
Betsy doesn't meet the wife until her first night, when she encounters her in a tower where she is kept. The film almost sinks to stock Universal-style "damsel-in-danger" schlock, but not quite. It is at this point that she learns her charge is catatonic (or a zombie). The "zombie," (if that is what she is), is a beautiful, mindless woman who wanders around in a flowing white gown.
Speaking of stock characters, the roles played by blacks in this movie (as in Lewton movies in general), are not at all "stock" stereotype roles.
Alma (Teresa Harris) is a sassy, likeable maid with ideas of her own. She also gets some of the best lines in the movie. After trying a radical cure, which fails but does not kill the patient, Alma says "There are other doctors, better doctors" referring to her voodoo gods. She also has a great line about horses being a lot like men -- you have to turn your back on one to get him to follow you.
Another unique role for a black actor is the character played by Sir Lancelot. He is interestingly complex for a character with such a small role. He is singing in the background of a small cafe where Betsy is having lunch and Wesley is on his third drink. Sir Lancelot starts singing a song about the "shame and sorrow" brought to the Holland family by the one brother loving the other brother's wife. Then he makes a big production of apologizing, saying he didn't know Mr. Wesley had a woman with him, and going on in such a way as to make the whole thing much worse. In case anyone thought he was earnestly innocent and inept at apologizing, he appears again later, after Wesley has passed out, and sings a new stanza to the song to Betsy, about the pretty young nurse come to help the wife, and the brothers can't help but notice her. Betsy is "rescued" at the last by a woman who turns out to be Mrs. Rand, the mother of both Paul and Wesley.
One of the most practical, down-to-earth, and likeable characters, Mrs. Rand runs a pharmacy and does her best to help the local doctor help the poor people of Saint Sebastien.
The whole movie revolves around whether we are to accept the rational medical explanation of Ms. Jessica's state, such as one would expect from Mrs. Rand or the doctor, (fever followed by a catatonic state) or Alma's supernatural voodoo explanation.
Betsy has a fear of the dark, which is a common theme with female characters' in other Lewton films, such as young Teresa Delgado in The Leopard Man. Betsy is nonetheless a practical young woman, and she overcomes her childhood fear to take Jessica to the voodoo Humfort, hoping the voodoo gods might be able to cure the woman, so Betsy can restore her to Paul, whom Betsy has come to love.
The scene in which Betsy "walks with a zombie" through the cane fields is superb. It is eerie, beautiful, mysterious and at once tense and flowing. The wind blows and the cane rattles, and the moon is full, and the conch shell sounds its long, lonely call, as the two women, one dressed in a practical nurse-like coat, the other in a gothic-romance heroine white gown (which somehow doesn't seem "stock"), walk along as the drums beat a steady, pulsing rhythm, and they pass obeh signs (such as dead animals hanging from trees).
They are protected, Alma tells them, by the voodoo patches she pins on each, a sign for the guard to let them pass unharmed. But Betsy loses hers early on, and we fear what will happen to her without it. Finally they come to the guard, one of the scariest-looking creatures I've ever seen in a movie (barring the crude gore-fest monsters of more recent years) -- a tall, thin silent black zombie with staring pop-eyes. The loss of the patch turns out to be an effective tease, but one feels oneself tensing as he turns in to follow them after letting them pass.
(Later in the movie the zombie also holds his arms out to show his lack of comprehension much the way Boris Karloff does as Frankenstein's monster. This is another instance of the way Lewton lent dignity to his black characters).
When Betsy gets Jessica to the Humfort, she is whisked inside the secret room, where she finds Mrs. Rand, who for years has been playing at speaking for the voodoo gods in order to get the people to follow her practical advice for their health. In other words, she gives Betsy the most sensible, rational explanation for everything. But undercutting her story, outside the secret room, the voodoo priest is testing Jessica and finding that she doesn't bleed (and hence she really is a zombie, as far as the voodoo followers are concerned). In fact, the voodoo priest is able to call Jessica to him through the use of a doll, so that the non-rational explanation we see fits less and less with the rational explanation we are hear from the mouths of the main characters.
It comes then as only a half-surprise when, late in the film, Mrs. Rand "confesses" that she made Jessica into a zombie -- that she began by pretending to believe in order to help others, but when she saw how Jessica was "beautiful enough to take my family in her hands and tear it apart," she told the voodoo god that Jessica was an evil woman and asked him to make her a zombie, and she heard his voice. She then returned home, distraught and trying to convince herself that it was all nonsense only to find Jessica in a violent fever. So, at this point, the voice of rationality offers the supernatural explanation, and takes blame upon herself.
At this point, the doctor offers the rational explanation, saying it was a coincidence, and that since Jessica never died or even went into a coma, even according to voodoo tradition, she couldn't be a zombie. He is trying to make Mrs. Rand feel better, and although she appears to accept his words, we never learn if she believes him or not.
However, his words convince Wesley -- that Jessica is indeed a zombie, as only he and Paul know that Jessica did in fact go into a coma for a while. From then on, Wesley acts to "free" Jessica, and comes under the influence of the voodoo priest himself.
I don't want to completely spoil the ending, in hopes that some folks will read this far even though they haven't seen the film, so I won't take it right to the end, but let you view it for yourselves. As in many Lewton films, there is a little saying at the end (this one is read aloud, rather than written on the screen), and this one is particularly good, and a lot less vague than some of the others.
Karin Wikoff
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